Dan Houser quit Rockstar because he didn’t “have another one of those games in me”; says humans, not AI, will dominate creative endeavours

Grand Theft Auto veteran Dan Houser believes that human beings will be the driving force in creative endeavours now and forever.

Speaking to Radio 4 about his debut novel A Better Paradise – incidentally about an artificial intelligence gone rogue – the Rockstar co-founder said that he thinks what large language model-powered AI tech produces is “generic”. This echoes comments Houser made earlier this week, where he said AI is “not as useful as some companies would have you believe.”

“In most areas, the future of quality writing is writing by humans,” Houser told Radio 4 host Kate Molleson.

“Most creative endeavours are still very human-dominated and will be forever, at least if they are using the equivalent of language models to make stuff, as far as I understand. It can sometimes produce interesting random things, but it’s quite generic, the level of content it creates.”

Houser was also asked about his decision to leave Rockstar in 2020. In short, the development vet said that the studio’s projects took so long to make and had become increasingly complex; he wasn’t sure if he had it in him to complete another game.

“The projects are really long and tough and take a long time to make,” he explained.

“It can be a tough journey getting things at that scale with that many moving parts finished and you’ve got 4,500 lines of dialogue and equal numbers of parts of other things trying to assemble itself. It’s this huge production experience and that swallows all of your time for many years at a time and I didn’t know if I had another one of those games in me.”

Recently, Rockstar has come under scrutiny for firing staff who were members of a Discord run by a worker’s union, prompting allegations of union-busting which the company itself has denied. With this context, Molleson asked whether the games industry is a good place to work; Houser says “fundamentally, yes”.

“That’s why I work in it and I encourage other people to work in it,” he said.

“No industry is ever perfect, but my experience in the games industry has been it’s fundamentally… all companies are different, but it’s fundamentally a positive and supportive environment for most people most of the time. But nowhere is perfect.”

Houser left Rockstar in 2020 and founded a new company called Absurd Ventures the following year, before officially announcing the firm in 2023.